This article analyses the writings of French writer and journalist Marcelle Capy , who held an uncommon position in the French intellectual field throughout the First World War. Going against the mainstream French feminist groups, who all prioritized loyalty to the fatherland over pacifism, Capy remained faithful to her socialist and anti-war creed. Although little known to the larger French public, Capy's double marginality as a woman and as a pacifist makes her work a singular testimony of

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... war years as well as a significant example of the rejection of the national climate and Union sacrée's rhetoric. In the first section of this article, I will locate Capy in the national context, within the spectrum of attitudes adopted by female activists. I will then focus on her writings, studying in particular her text Une Voix de femme dans la mêlée ('A Woman's Voice Amidst the Conflict'). I argue that the strength of her criticism stems from her use of narrative, rather than from political-theoretical analyses. The short stories that compose the majority of her writings, presented as pieces of direct and "non-manipulated" testimony, offer a counter-point to national narratives and an attempt to defamiliarize the public perception of World War I. From the start of World War I, in France and in the rest of Europe, both authors and ordinary citizens were writing about the conflict. As the first modern war fought by soldiers who were mostly literate, it instigated an immense outpouring of written accounts. Poems, diaries, letters, pamphlets, and novels quickly became, and still remain today, an integral part of the war event itself. Although the majority of the authors, for obvious reasons, were men, women soon took part in the intellectual effort of documenting, representing, and trying to make sense of the ongoing conflict. Despite their limited presence in bibliographies and textbooks on World War I even today, as historian Dorothy Goldman has noted, women "wrote about their experiences constantly. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that they found inspiration in the war" (96). 1 Being cut off from the front, the main stage of the "theater of war," women focused on and described the "backstage" of the conflict, the home front, which oftentimes presented no less absurd and dramatic situations than the front itself, especially in the zones under military occupation. Less directly confronted by the war's horrors as faced by the soldiers, the women on the home front described how precisely these same horrors manifested in civil society. In France, the wartime texts of women cover a vast spectrum and range, from pro-war texts to pacifist pamphlets. Undoubtedly, the best-known woman writer of the time, Colette, wrote several texts that occupy an intermediate position on the spectrum of war literature written by women. Texts such as Les heures longues ('The Long Hours') and Mitsou, ou comment l'esprit vient aux filles (Mitsou) do not openly denounce the conflict. However, as Agnès Cardinal shows, what distinguishes them from pro-war writings is "the refusal to engage in public rhetoric of any kind [and the choice to] simply describe the absurd ways in which people behave" (Cardinal 161). Colette's critique of the war society manifests itself in an oblique way, which also guaranteed protection from censorship. In comparison to the number of publications by women in other belligerent nations, however, there are relatively few in France, and, as Cardinal comments, "it is astonishing that so few stories about women's destinies in war-torn France ever reached publication" (152-53).